[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 99 (Tuesday, June 24, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H5644-H5646]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH USA GENERAL ASSEMBLY MEETING
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from
Virginia (Mr. Wolf) for 5 minutes.
Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I rise today as a follower of Jesus and a
lifelong member of the Presbyterian Church USA who is deeply grieved by
what transpired at last week's gathering of PCUSA's General Assembly. I
feel increasingly alienated from this rich faith tradition, which
includes John Witherspoon, the only active clergyman to sign the
Declaration of Independence, and submit for the Record a statement of
protest by the Presbyterian Lay Committee Board of Directors, which
expresses a similar sentiment.
[June 19, 2014]
Presbyterian Lay Committee Board of Directors Repudiates Action of
PCUSA General Assembly
(By Carmen Fowler LaBerge)
Detroit, MI.--A statement of protest by the Presbyterian
Lay Committee repudiating the action of the General Assembly
of the Presbyterian Church USA to redefine marriage. The
221st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has
approved both an Authoritative Interpretation of the
Constitution and an amendment to redefine marriage. In the
name of 1.8 million Presbyterians nationwide, the General
Assembly has committed an express repudiation of the Bible,
the mutually agreed upon Confessions of the PCUSA, thousands
of years of faithfulness to God's clear commands and the
denominational ordination vows of each concurring
commissioner. This is an abomination. The Presbyterian Lay
Committee mourns these actions and calls on all Presbyterians
to resist and protest them. You should tell your pastor and
the members of your session that you disapprove of these
actions. You should refuse to fund the General Assembly, your
synod, your presbytery and even your local church if those
bodies have not explicitly and publicly repudiated these
unbiblical actions. God will not be mocked and those who
substitute their own felt desires for God's unchangeable
Truth will not be found guiltless before a holy God. The
Presbyterian Lay Committee will continue to call for
repentance and reform: repentance of those who have clearly
erred at this General Assembly and reform of the PCUSA
according to the Word of God. Presbyterian Lay Committee
Board of Directors, June 19, 2014.
Mr. WOLF. I will begin with marriage. After several years of internal
discussion and debate, the assembly voted overwhelmingly to take a
position which runs counter to the counsel of Scripture, which defines
marriage as the divinely inspired joining of one man and one woman.
It has long been clear that our culture is in the throes of a seismic
shift on this issue. While the current marriage debate is centered
around the notion of same-sex unions, in reality there has been a
decades-long assault on marriage, such that what was once almost
universally recognized as a God-ordained and created institution, the
fundamental building block of any society and the nexus of procreation
and childrearing, has now been called into question both in the larger
culture and increasingly in the legal framework which governs this
land. But perhaps the most striking and troubling is that increasingly
this is happening within the church itself, which has historically
served as a bulwark against the cultural whims of the day.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says:
Haven't you read . . . that at the beginning the Creator
``made them male and female,'' and said, ``For this reason, a
man will leave his father and mother and be united to his
wife, and two will become one flesh''? So they are no longer
but two, but one. Therefore, what God has joined together let
man not separate.''
This passage and others like it remind me of Reverend Billy Graham's
comments and the lead-up to the 2012 North Carolina ballot initiative
regarding marriage, when he remarked:
The Bible is clear--God's definition of marriage is between
a man and a woman.
In addition to marriage, I was also troubled by the PCUSA's action on
Israel. I submit for the Record a Wall Street Journal piece which ran
yesterday regarding the vote to divest the denomination stock from
three American companies that do business with Israel in the West Bank
citing their ``involvement in the occupation and the violation of human
rights in the region.''
[From the Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2014]
Presbyterians Join the Anti-Israel Choir
Divesting From Companies Like Motorola Solutions to show Solidarity
With the Palestinians
(By Jonathan Marks)
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is bleeding members.
Between 2000 and 2013, almost 765,000 members left the
organization, a loss of nearly 30%. Last week the church's
leadership met in Detroit for crisis talks.
No, not about the emptying-pews crisis. The Israel-
Palestinian crisis.
On Friday, in a close vote (310-303), the General Assembly
of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)--the largest of several
Presbyterian denominations in America--resolved to divest the
organization's stock in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and
Motorola Solutions. The church's Committee on Mission
Responsibility Through Investment said the companies have
continued to ``profit from their involvement in the
occupation and the violation of human rights in the region,''
and have even ``deepened their involvement in roadblocks to a
just peace.'' Israel's counterterrorism and defense measures
have included razing Palestinian houses (with Caterpillar
equipment), operating Gaza and West Bank checkpoints (with
Hewlett-Packard technology), and utilizing military
communications and surveillance (with Motorola Solutions
technology).
The church signaled its antipathy for Israel earlier this
year by hawking a study guide called ``Zionism Unsettled'' in
its online church store. In the 76-page pamphlet, Zionism--
the movement to establish a Jewish homeland and nation-state
in the historic land of Israel--is characterized as a ``a
struggle for colonial and racist supremacist privilege.''
In a postscript to ``Zionism Unsettled,'' Naim Ateek, a
Palestinian priest and member of the Anglican Church,
explains the meaning of the charges in the pamphlet. ``It is
the equivalent of declaring Zionism heretical, a doctrine
that fosters both political
[[Page H5645]]
and theological injustice. This is the strongest condemnation
that a Christian confession can make against any doctrine
that promotes death rather than life.''
In one response, Katharine Henderson, president of New
York's Auburn Theological Seminary, said in February that the
``premise of the document appears to be that Zionism is the
cause of the entire conflict in the Middle East,'' in essence
``the original sin, from which flows all the suffering of the
Palestinian people.'' And amid intense criticism of the study
guide from the Anti-Defamation League and other groups, the
church's General Assembly declared on Wednesday that ``
`Zionism Unsettled' does not represent the views of the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).'' But the assembly didn't bar
the church from continuing to distribute and sell it.
The divestment resolution that ultimately passed included
language affirming Israel's right to exist and denying that
divesting from the three companies is tantamount to alignment
with the broader Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
movement against Israel. Still, the vote is a victory for
anti-Israel forces within the church. And the divestment vote
hardly means that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is ready
to shift its focus: The organization's Middle East Issues
Committee sees only one Middle East issue. All 14 of the
matters before it this year concerned Israel and Palestine.
No Syria. No Iraq.
Another vote regarding Palestinian-Israeli matters by the
church's General Assembly, seemingly more innocuous, is
actually more disturbing. The vote instructed the church's
Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy to prepare a
report to help the General Assembly reconsider its commitment
to a two-state solution and to create a study guide ``that
will help inform the whole church of the situation on the
ground in Palestine.''
In its ``advice and counsel'' on an anti-divestment
proposal, the committee voiced its support for the boycott-
Israel movement, compared Israel with apartheid-era South
Africa and declared Israel responsible for its own ``de-
legitimation.'' It complained that the anti-divestment
proposal ``prioritize[d] Israel's security and underline[d]
the flaws of Hamas and other `hostile' neighbors without
noting the constant violence of the occupation.'' Even with
respect to Hamas, whose charter commits it to the destruction
of Israel, the committee felt compelled to put ``hostile'' in
scare quotes. The committee has some history on this score:
In 2004, it drew widespread condemnation for meeting with
leaders of the terrorist organization Hezbollah.
The General Assembly instructed the advisory committee that
the new study guide should ``honestly point out'' that
``simple financial investment in a completely occupied land
where the occupiers are relentless and unwavering regarding
their occupation is not enough to dismantle the matrix of
that occupation or dramatically change the vast majority of
communities or individual lives that are bowed and broken by
systematic and intentional injustice.'' The vote to
commission the guide was 482-88.
With a dwindling membership, the Presbyterian Church
(U.S.A.) clearly needs new friends, but the church does
itself no favors by courting Israel's enemies.
Mr. WOLF. The PCUSA's deeply misguided decision comes against a
backdrop of rising anti-Semitism in Europe and even here in the United
States.
I submit for the Record a June 20 Washington Post piece highlighting
the problem, which noted that ``Jewish leaders here are now warning of
a recent and fundamental shift tied to a spurt of homegrown anti-
Semitism.''
[From the Washington Post, June 20, 2014]
A ``New Anti-Semitism'' Rising in France
(By Anthony Faiola)
Paris--``I am not an anti-Semite,'' French comedian
Dieudonnee M'bala M'bala says with a devilish grin near the
start of his hit show at this city's Theeaatre de la Main
d'Or.
Then come the Jew jokes.
In front of a packed house, he apes Alain Jakubowicz, a
French Jewish leader who calls the humor of Dieudonnee
tantamount to hate speech. While the comedian skewers
Jakubowicz, Stars of David glow on screen and, as the
audience guffaws, a soundtrack plays evoking the trains to
Nazi death camps. In various other skits, he belittles the
Holocaust, then mocks it as a gross exaggeration.
In a country where Jewish leaders are decrying the worst
climate of anti-Semitism in decades, Dieudonnee, a longtime
comedian and erstwhile politician whose attacks on Jews have
grown progressively worse, is a sign of the times. French
authorities issued an effective ban on his latest show in
January for inciting hate. So he reworked the material to get
back on stage--cutting, for instance, one joke lamenting the
lack of modern-day gas chambers.
But the Afro-French comedian, whose stage name is simply
Dieudonnee, managed to salvage other bits, including his
signature ``quenelle'' salute. Across Europe, the downward-
pointing arm gesture that looks like an inverted Nazi salute
has now gone so viral that it has popped up on army bases, in
parliaments, at weddings and at professional soccer matches.
Neo-Nazis have used it in front of synagogues and Holocaust
memorials. Earlier this year, bands of Dieudonnee supporters
flashed it during a street protest in Paris while shouting,
``Jews, out of France!''
``Dieudonnee is getting millions of views on his videos on
the Internet and is spreading his quenelle,'' said Roger
Cukierman, president of the Council for Jewish Institutions
in France. ``Something very worrying is happening in France.
This is not a good time for Jews.''
Dieudonnee was unavailable for comment, but his attorney,
Sanjay Mirabeau, said the comedian was simply speaking truth
to power.
``If the Portuguese were protected in France and had big
influence, then he would protest the Portuguese,'' Mirabeau
said. ``But as it is, there are others'' who fit that
description.
Jewish leaders say Dieudonnee is a symptom of a larger
problem. Here and across the region, they are talking of the
rise of a ``new anti-Semitism'' based on the convergence of
four main factors. They cite classic scapegoating amid hard
economic times, the growing strength of far-right
nationalists, a deteriorating relationship between black
Europeans and Jews, and, importantly, increasing tensions
with Europe's surging Muslim population.
In Western Europe, no nation has seen the climate for Jews
deteriorate more than France.
Anti-Semitism has ebbed and flowed here and throughout the
region since the end of World War II, with outbreaks of
violence and international terrorism--particularly in the
1980s and early 2000s--often linked to the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. But Jewish leaders here are now warning
of a recent and fundamental shift tied to a spurt of
homegrown anti-Semitism.
This month, authorities arrested Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-
year-old French national, and charged him with the May
killings of four people inside a Jewish museum in Brussels.
The attack was the deadliest act of anti-Semitism in Western
Europe since a gunman killed seven people, including three
children at a Jewish day school, in Toulouse in 2012.
Nemmouche allegedly launched his attack after a tour of duty
with rebels in Syria, prompting fears of additional violence
to come as more of the hundreds of French nationals fighting
there make their way home.
In a country that is home to the largest Jewish community
in Europe, the first three months of the year saw reported
acts of anti-Semitic violence in France skyrocket to 140
incidents, a 40 percent increase from the same period last
year. This month, two young Jewish men were severely beaten
on their way to synagogue in an eastern suburb of Paris.
Near the city's Montmartre district, home to the Moulin
Rouge and the Sacree-Coeur basilica, a woman verbally
accosted a Jewish mother before rattling the carriage of her
6-month-old child and shouting, ``dirty Jewess . . . you Jews
have too many children,'' according to a report filed by
France's National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, not far from the rolling vineyards of Bordeaux,
stars of David were recently spray-painted on the homes of
Jews.
A recent global survey by the New York-based Anti-
Defamation League suggested that France now has the highest
percentage in Western Europe--37 percent--of people openly
harboring anti-Semitic views. That compares with 8 percent in
Britain, 20 percent in Italy and 27 percent in Germany.
Jewish leaders chalk that up in part to growing
radicalization of youths in France's Muslim population--the
largest in Europe--as well as outrage in the general public
and French media over Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.
But it is also far more complex.
Anti-Semitism, Jewish activists fear, is becoming more
socially acceptable. In May, for instance, the far-right
National Front--a party long rooted in anti-Semitism but
which sought to portray itself as reformed--came in first in
elections here for the European Parliament, winning a
whopping 25 percent of the national vote. Yet last week, its
patriarch, Jean-Marie Le Pen, suggested just how unreformed a
segment of the party remains. In a video posted on the
party's Web site, he suggested that a Jewish folk singer
should be thrown into an oven.
Le Pen's daughter and current party leader, Marine Le Pen,
offered a rare rebuke of her father's words and ordered
footage of the comments removed from the party's Web site.
The elder Le Pen's musings were nevertheless seen as
unsurprising within a party whose older members have long
harkened back to the days of Vichy France, the Nazi
collaborators who allowed tens of thousands of French Jews to
go to their deaths.
``I walked into my kosher sandwich shop the other day and
the owner asked me, `Is it time to leave? Are we Nazi Germany
yet?' '' said Shimon Samuels, the Paris-based international
director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. ``We've got the
National Front in first place. We've got Dieudonnee,
spreading his hate. So I told him, `Well, do you really want
to be the last to go?' ''
Indeed, French migration to Israel in 2013 jumped to 3,200
people, up 64 percent from 2012. A huge uptick in departures
this year has Jewish leaders here predicting that at least
5,000 French Jews will leave in 2014.
``We've been thinking about moving for a long time, but the
climate was not as dangerous as it is now,'' said Alain, 30,
a medical equipment specialist who is moving to Israel
[[Page H5646]]
in July with his wife and three children. He declined to give
his last name out of fear for his family's security.
Sitting at his modest dining-room table in eastern Paris, a
set of moving boxes in the next room, he added: ``It bothers
me because this is not normal; this is not how I remember
France when I was growing up.''
Two weeks ago, Alain said, he woke up to find his 13-year-
old daughter, Michele, crying. After a recent attack on two
Jewish boys not far from her school, she said she was too
afraid to join her regular car pool. Instead, she demanded
that he take her to school and pick her up, standing guard as
she entered and exited each day. He has moved his work
schedule around to accommodate her request.
Asked what she was scared of, Michele, an elegant French
teenager in a fashionable black skirt and white T-shirt,
looked down and said: ``I'm afraid that what happened in
Toulouse will happen at my school, too. . . . I hear what
people say about Jews. And I am scared.''
Enter Dieudonnee.
Born to a father from Cameroon and a white French mother,
Dieudonnee, ironically, rose to stardom in the 1990s as part
of a duo act with EElie Semoun, a Jewish comedian. But the
two grew estranged as Dieudonnee's humor became
indistinguishable from anti-Semitic diatribe.
In the 2000s, he wooed the far right and the far left as
his campaign against Zionism made him an unlikely symbol for
both. Throughout the 2000s, he was repeatedly fined for
making a variety of anti-Semitic statements, including his
description of Holocaust commemorations as ``memorial porn.''
Blacklisted from mainstream TV shows and radio, he
nevertheless thrives, with a cultlike following on stage and
via the Internet, where his satirical videos stand out among
a rash of new anti-Semitic Web sites in France. As he has
become less mainstream, he has traded larger venues for
relatively smaller theater spaces where he is filling seats
with fans across racial, political and socioeconomic
spectrums.
Dieudonnee is an equal-opportunity offender. His act is a
study in provocation, targeting not only Jews but also gays
and mainstream politicians. Yet--as evidenced by the T-shirts
bearing the quenelle salute on sale at his shows--he tends to
reserve his toughest punch lines for Jews.
Over the past year, observers say, his depictions have
sharply worsened. His act became so offensive that the French
government in January took the rare step of encouraging local
jurisdictions to bar his performances. The move forced him to
tone down his material, largely by deploying inference and
shorthand to get his point across.
Mr. WOLF. The denomination's action on Israel stands in stark
contrast to its inaction on the persecuted church in the region. The
PCUSA expressly declined to sign a recently issued Pledge of Solidarity
and Call to Action, which more than 200 religious leaders from across
the country signed on to.
Representatives of the American church came together across
ecumenical lines to pledge to do more to help beleaguered minority
faith communities, foremost among them, the ancient Christian
communities in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. The PCUSA privately expressed
concern that this action would be perceived as an ``anti-Muslim''
statement.
The pledge itself was carefully crafted with input from faith leaders
here in the United States and throughout the region and conveyed that
the time has come for the church in the West to ``pray and speak with
greater urgency about this human rights crisis.'' With the PCUSA's
decision not to associate itself with the urgent call to action, I find
myself once again out of step with my denomination in profound ways.
I believe many of the giants of this tradition, among them: Reverend
Peter Marshall of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where
President Lincoln worshipped, and a former Senate Chaplain; Reverend
Dick Halverson, senior pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church and also a
Senate Chaplain; Reverend Louis Evans, pastor for 18 years of National
Presbyterian Church; and Reverend James Boice, pastor of Tenth
Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia would find it difficult to
recognize the PCUSA church today.
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